Reinventing Romantic Poetry : Russian Women Poets of the Mid-nineteenth Century

all the poets in the generation preceding them, including Goethe and

Schiller, wrote or translated anacreontic odes. So much a part of the

canon were they that Karl Grossheinrich unselfconsciously used them

to teach Greek grammar to the thirteen-year-old Elisaveta Kul’man and

then had her translate them into eight languages. Kul’man’s introduc-

tion to her translations, in which she uncomfortably asks Anacreon for

his blessing, expresses some of the awkwardness she apparently felt

with the subject matter.^31

Another “traditional” and widespread genre of the time were Bacchic

songs (vakkhicheskie pesni), which describe men’s encounters in the

woods with bacchantes, understood to be sexually available women—

although the man was often depicted as forcing himself on the bac-

chante. In his third Pushkin article, Belinsky, who despised etiquette

books as oppressive to women, approvingly quoted in full Batiushkov’s

“Vakkhanka” (The bacchante, 1814–15)—a poem that eroticizes vio-

lence and celebrates rape:

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([.. .] She ran

More lightly than a young antelope

Zephyrs lifted her hair

Interwoven with moss

Impudently her garments rose

And they twisted into a tangle

Her graceful figure wound round

32 Social Conditions